Ryan Roach and Mathiew Stubbings: Charged With Hacking US University Supercomputers to Mine Crypto

On 28 October 2026, Canada handed Ryan James Roach, 35, of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to the United States. He was sent to answer a federal case in western New York with an unusual claim at its centre. Prosecutors allege that he and another Canadian broke into American universities, sought out the most powerful computers on campus, and put them to work making cryptocurrency for themselves.

Roach and Mathiew James Stubbings, 41, of Ontario, are charged in an indictment (a formal charge sheet approved by a grand jury) in the Western District of New York. US Attorney Michael DiGiacomo announced the case. The charges are conspiracy to obtain information from and cause damage to a protected computer, obtaining information from a protected computer, and intentionally damaging a protected computer. Each man faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted. Neither has been convicted of anything, and both are presumed innocent.

The indictment covers June 2016 to December 2019 and institutions in New York, Tennessee, North Carolina and Massachusetts. None of them has been named. Nor has the size of the alleged haul: CyberScoop reports that officials did not say how much cryptocurrency was mined. The largest dollar figure on record comes from Canada, where a court was told that one New York school suffered about $337,000 in damage.

Computers doing sums for coins

Cryptocurrency has no central bank printing it. Many coins are created by mining: computers around the world do a very large number of sums to check and record transactions, and the network pays them in new coins. Mining is legal. Its costs are the machines and the electricity, and the more calculating power a miner has, the more coins it can expect to earn.

Think of a print shop that is paid by the page. The paper, the ink and the power are the costs. Someone who slips in at night and runs the presses on another firm's account keeps the fee and leaves the owner with the bill. Secretly mining on someone else's computers works the same way. The intruder collects the coins, while the owner pays for the power, the wear on the machines and the clean-up.

That is why a campus would be an attractive target. A supercomputer is a very large set of linked machines that universities use for scientific research, and it can do more sums than almost anything a private person could buy. According to the indictment, as reported by The Cyber Express and BleepingComputer, Roach and Stubbings went after US educational institutions that had supercomputers. Prosecutors say the pair caused at least one supercomputer to mine cryptocurrency on their behalf.

What prosecutors allege

The case as described by the US Department of Justice and reported by CyberScoop, BleepingComputer and The Cyber Express runs in stages.

First came the cover. Prosecutors allege the two men rented virtual private servers (space on computers in commercial data centres) in Europe and the United States, registered under false names, so that their traffic would be hard to trace.

Next came the break-ins. They are accused of researching weaknesses in university networks, getting in without permission, and looking around once inside to widen their access. Prosecutors allege they installed malware, the general word for harmful software, including rootkits, a type built to hide itself from the people who run a computer.

Then came the alleged payoff. According to the indictment, login details and data were taken from the victims and sent to the servers the men controlled, and the same servers delivered malware and mining software to victim computers.

The final allegation is about hiding the trail. Prosecutors say the men used compromised victim machines to reach other victims, so an intrusion would look as if it came from another institution's own systems. They also allege that access to supercomputers was used to find further targets with weaknesses to exploit.

The indictment says the pair damaged 10 or more protected computers within a one-year period, causing a loss of at least $5,000. The Cyber Express notes that this figure is tied to the legal threshold for the damage charge and is not a full estimate of harm. If convicted, the men would also have to forfeit networking and data storage equipment, according to CyberScoop.

What the Canadian court heard

Canada does not hand anyone over on request alone, so the US case had to be put before a Saskatchewan judge. That hearing produced more detail on a narrower part of the case: one New York school in 2017.

CBC News reported that US prosecutors allege Roach conspired with Stubbings to hack that school, steal more than 1,900 login credentials, install malware, and use its supercomputer to mine Electroneum, a small and little-known cryptocurrency. The breach is said to have cost the institution roughly $337,000 in US dollars. Coin Edition, citing the published ruling, reported that the figure was mainly the cost of rebuilding and securing the supercomputer. The school has not been named.

According to the US case put before the court, FBI investigators traced what they called a digital trail to Roach through IP addresses (the numbers that identify a computer online), server logs, email accounts and hosting records. The US case also relied on his internet searches.

Roach gave a different account. Coin Edition reported that he told the court he had partnered with Stubbings on unrelated business and learned of the hacks only after they began. His lawyer argued, according to CBC News, that the timing of the searches showed a man trying to understand what Stubbings was doing, not planning anything. Justice Grant Currie of the Saskatchewan Court of King's Bench accepted that was possible, but found that the relationship between the men and the other evidence supported an inference that they had an agreement.

That finding was not a verdict. An extradition judge decides only whether the evidence is strong enough to send someone for trial. As CBC News put it, "The ruling does not determine whether Roach is innocent or guilty."

From Saskatoon to a US courtroom

Justice Currie committed Roach for extradition on 7 May 2026, for conduct matching the Canadian offence of conspiracy to commit unauthorized use of a computer, which can carry up to 10 years in prison in Canada. Roach's lawyer, Patricia Farnese, told CBC News: "The judge gave his decision, we're following due process." Roach did not appeal the committal. The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal granted him interim release until the final decision by the federal justice minister, Sean Fraser, who had 90 days to decide. Coin Edition reported that the deadline was later moved to 4 October 2026.

Three weeks after that date, Roach was in the United States. He was arraigned (brought before a court to hear the charges) before US Magistrate Judge Mark W. Pedersen and held pending a detention hearing on 3 November, which decides whether a defendant stays in custody before trial. The Crypto Economy news site reports that he pleaded not guilty. The result had not been reported by 5 November.

Stubbings remains in Canada, where extradition proceedings against him are continuing. He will be arraigned only if he is brought to the United States.

The case itself is not new. CyberScoop reports that a grand jury first indicted the two men in April 2022, more than four years before Roach reached a US court. The FBI investigated, working with the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, and Assistant US Attorney Meghan K. McGuire is prosecuting.